


amor fati

by klickitats



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Chance Meetings, Exalted Plains, Houses on Fire, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 18:11:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8811007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klickitats/pseuds/klickitats
Summary: Dorian and Bull, out of time. A moment on the Exalted Plains.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tofsla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/gifts).



> Written for tofsla's prompt for battle wounds. Thank you for your vivid prompt--I went a little wild with it. There's mess to be found in spades, here, but hopefully not tragedy. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Amor fati: a Latin idiom meaning "love of one's fate," or the concept of accepting all parts of life, both sweet and bitter, as necessary.

“I like that smell,” Bull says, leaning back against the tree. His palms face up towards the pink-stained sky. “Good enough to eat.”

Dorian looks up from the wooden bowl propped in his lap. He’s using the bottom of a cup to crush up the plant. “Not unless you’re trying to give yourself the shits.”

Bull snorts. When a little smile curls at the edge of his mouth, the lines around his good eye deepen. Dorian looks back down at the pitiful dust, and mutters, “But I doubt that would even rank among the stupidest things you’ve done today.”

“You keeping a tally?” Now Bull’s eye opens. “I’m flattered.”

Sera and Lavellan have been gone for hours now—scouting the terrain for rabbits, or rams that haven’t fled as far away as they can from this void-taken hole. _I don’t know anything about healing,_ Lavellan had told him with a shrug. _Try._

 _I doubt I know any more,_ Dorian protested. _Why didn’t you bring Solas or Vivienne, if you wanted a healer?_

The look she had given him was quick and cutting, a withering dismissal if he’d ever felt one. He’d made the mistake of writing her off as an unlucky Dalish elder, trusted with the task of spying for her people—wrong place, wrong time. She had a gentle mouth, and the lines on her face softened her, instead of making her look like a bust carved from a tree trunk. Instead, he found out she wielded a two-handed sword bigger than he was, and that she could make her voice carry across an entire mountain while running a drill. Soldiers idolized her, fell over themselves to meet her orders head on. Cullen worshipped the ground she walked on—would have given her the mantle of commander in a moment’s time, if she’d demanded it. But she was Inquisitor, and someone had to take care of the little things. That was that.

 _Are you trying to convince me I shouldn’t take you out on the road?_ The antiquated phrasing of it made it even worse, like a grandmother scolding her son.

 _I—no_.

 _Then prove you’re worth something, Dorian._ She never raised her voice unless she had to, and she certainly didn’t now. _Hop to it._

Dorian says, “You stopped coughing,” in lieu of a reply.

“Stitches burns embrium in winter when the sniffles spread. Says it opens up the chest.” Bull arches his back a little, and Dorian can hear the _pop_ of bone from ten meters away. “Not that I need it. Is there liquor in her pack?”

His eyebrows nearly graze his forehead. “I’m not—I’m not _rifling_ through Lavellan’s things.”

Bull rolls his eye. “You gotta be kidding me. It’s no different than swiping a bottle from her cellar.”

“Because she doesn’t care for wine, Bull.” Dorian fixes him with a look. “I’m sure she’ll notice the whiskey.”

“Tell her I did it, then.”

He rolls his eyes. “Oh, _please_ —”

“Come on,” Bull goads gently, tipping his head back again to rest against the massive tree trunk. Dorian looked at the pitiful mash of poultice in what was once his dinner bowl. “She’ll buy it. I’ve got, uh, pretty dextrous wrists.”

And then Dorian looks—his eyes, of his own accord, going back to Bull’s hands and their smoldering. The embrium in his lap erases the smell from the air too, of tar-sticky flesh and burnt palms.

He has made a study of the dead and their carcasses left behind on the mortal earth. The way bone and muscle stiffened once the soul had gone, how to breathe the shadow of life back into the skeleton. To make it move, remember the toils of its life, and defend. They are ravaged when he conjures them back to life. Broken bones, razed flesh, heads held on by a scrap of flesh and nothing more. But they have work to do. They wouldn’t move under his hand if they didn’t wish to go on, still.

But it’s nothing near working on a breathing, living being.

(He remembers the events of the past few hours keenly, as easy as breathing: smoke, billowing out from a ruined shack on the river’s edge. There are no homes on the Exalted Plains any longer—just fortresses and burned-out frames, wood and stone skeletons discarded among the brush by careless hands. But if this house is different, Bull knows it before anyone else. And then he’s gone.

Sera’s faster on her feet, but it’s Lavellan who moves first, charging after him on powerful legs. Sera pauses, then she’s sprinting too.

Nobody catches up to him until he stops moving. Bull can be quick when he wants to be.

Dorian is the last to follow, although that’s not saying much. It’s only two hundred meters, give or take a few. He’s arrives at the flaming ruin just in time to see Bull pick up a tree trunk all by himself, rocking it back into his arms and lifting—the muscles in his back bunch and strain, sweat coursing down them, and he howls. Not in pain—one of those warrior yells meant to incite strength, and ferocity, and victory. _Howls_ , the sharp sound winding out of him and disappearing into the air.

What Dorian doesn’t know is the tree is smoldering too—doesn’t realize it until the smell hits his nostrils.)

The pause is long, too long. Dorian looks back down at his awful plant. “They look like the druffalo patties likes putting in the fire when it’s her turn to cook.” Sera did not cook anymore. It had been an idiotic idea to begin with. But Lavellan prescribed deeply to the concept of _everyone gets a turn._

“Smells about the same,” Bull says, grimacing, perhaps despite himself.

* * *

 

_Solis, 6:44 Steel._

The first battle for Seheron carves a line of fire down the island. Tevinter boils liquid fire that never stops burning, pours itself a barrier to hide behind after the Qunari back them into a corner. The potency of oil, the elasticity of wax—one of their better inventions, and the Qunari send their people straight up to the wall of flame. Figure out how it works, and bring it back so we can build a bridge, part the way, and win the war.

A satin curtain of fire, lovingly crafted and very impenetrable. Even Tevinter outdoes itself every once in awhile.

Not a bad spot, despite how it looks. Seheron has been Par Vollen’s for a handful of years now, despite repeated Tevinter attempts to take it back. Thwarted at every turn. It’s a harder battle on the mainland, where the Qunari are gaining ground, but Seheron’s port is theirs.

One of their youngest, a thinker named Imekari, goes up to prove himself. His first assignment, to cut his teeth, prove he knows his own ass from a hole in the ground. He’s seen fourteen endless Par Vollen summers, and nothing has prepared him for how he sweats in the Seheron jungle. Coast to coast, nothing but thick, wet green. There are older Ben-Hassrath better suited for the job, but they use an old Qunlat idiom to describe the war with Tevinter, _herah-athlok._ Something like—the work of time. They use it to describe a work that doesn’t cease, that means past, and present, and future all at once. When something never ends, you can never start early enough.

So he sleeps during the day, during the worst of the heat, and makes his way up to to the fire by night. Nobody expects him to do anything great, but more eyes are better than none. He looks at the wall of flame in the dark because it’s easiest to see, and more Ben-Hassrath are on duty. It doesn’t make any sense to say so, but he trusts them more than the hundred Sten and Ashaad standing like a cliff-wall ten meters back from the fire. Soldiers wait; Ben-Hassrath watch.

There are skirmishes when the Qunari try to come up from the water on the ‘Vint side of the island, or when ‘Vints sneak through a hole in the wall to try to snatch a few meters of land forward. Nothing works in either direction. It’s nothing like peace—nothing is, when the ‘Vints pull out a new trick, but it’s quieter than Imekari thought it would be.

Heavy hooded and faceless, they tend the flames at all hours. Imekari will be able to tell all them apart one day, but he can only differentiate between a few now—one with the limp on the right leg from a bad knee, the sloped shoulders of terrible posture.

Except for one.

He’s lying on the ground, examining the fuel for the wall. The fire burns hazy but clear, like a screen, and they’re always messing with it. And it’s as thick as his hand-span all the way down. There’s a sound, and when he glances up, somebody’s standing there, right on the other side.

Imekari’s never seen fire burn so steadfast before, not for all the coal in Qunandar, but he’s never seen a man this close before, either.

He goes very still. The ‘Vint doesn’t notice him.

This one’s young. No hood, tall for his age, with a soft brown face. Round cheeks. No heft in his shoulders, his gut. Gangly, but sure, enough height to keep an eye on. And all those robes. _Skirts_ , really. Stupidest thing he’s ever seen.

Qunari grow slow but steady, a few inches a year until suddenly you’re looking up at a mountain. One of their first lessons: mages are just men, flesh and fragile. Imekari figures—Hoodless is just that, just a man, so he’s hitting his spurt early. One day Imekari will look down on him, and know himself as a boot, and the man as an insect.

Hoodless has never had to pay much attention to his surroundings, either, even on a battlefield—he busies himself with the task, and Imekari goes unnoticed. He starts at the end of his section, pours clear liquid from a clay jar under one of his arms, the other hand extended out, little lights glowing along his fingertips. Walks slowly, step by step, along the wall.

Imekari finds his feet, and follows, step by step. Makes note. The first prickles of a mustache are coming in on his top lip, like a threadbare caterpillar. He can’t tell what color his eyes are through the haze and the thin flame, but they aren’t dark. He sweats just like Imekari does, beads of sweat on his forehead and his temples, dripping down over his jaw. A little mole lingers on his cheekbone. Like a tear.

Hoodless is banking the flames. So the wall needs fuel and a match—the oil in the jar, the sparks from his fingers. It’s magic, maybe, but not all the way. When Hoodless leans down, close to the wall, to pour the last dregs out from the jar, Imekari gets as close to the wall as he can. The fire threatens to lick the tip of his nose. In reality, they’re less than a foot apart. Hoodless has jet black hair growing long and unkempt, or maybe he just doesn’t care because it’s late, and nobody can see but Imekari.

The drops of oil take flame before they even touch the ground, like falling stars. Hoodless looks up—Imekari holds his breath tight, doesn’t move—and jumps, startled to the bone. Trips on the hem of his robe, lands on his ass. His jar falls from his hands and gets eaten by the flame—a little rush bursts up, singes one of Imekari’s eyebrows.

He doesn’t move. That’s not what you do after you catch the eye of an enemy. You hold, and look back. Breathe out, breathe in. He ignores the rattling of his heart, too. Nothing’s going to happen—there are twelve Ben-Hassrath with their eyes all over them and a wall of fire splitting them apart.

Hoodless doesn’t drop his gaze, either, even as he picks himself up from the ground. He hesitates, once he’s on his feet again, and then ducks a little closer, his elegant nose coming ever-closer to the wall. Like he doesn’t notice it all. Imekari almost opens his mouth, almost says, _watch yourself, you idiot,_ but catches himself at the last second.

And then they just stare at each other. Hoodless—Hoodless has one of those faces you can read like the moon. This close, he knows he messed up his age. He’s twelve, maybe. Just an open book. He won’t be, soon enough, but all Imekari knows is there’s no fear in that gaze. Not—not at all.

In the future, Imekari will say he looked in those eyes and saw cool arrogance, edged with the hatred of Tevinter. After all, that’s what he’s sure would be there.

But now, between them, all he can see is—curiosity. Maybe the same kind that made Imekari follow him down the wall. He’s never seen a ‘Vint up close before. They keep slaves of all kinds in Tevinter, and zoos, and pets, and the kind of thing that Imekari has nightmares about—but Hoodless is looking at him like he’s never seen a Qunari before. Maybe just not this close.

He cocks his head a little, as though taking stock of the shape of Imekari’s horns, the shape of his face, his shoulders.

This close, Hoodless’ eyes flicker in the firelight. They’re grey.

Then there’s a sound in the distance behind him—a rough voice, snapping. It breaks the spell and Hoodless swiftly turns on his heel, and then there’s nothing but flame, and shadow, and Imekari, with his one singed eyebrow.

He goes back, the next night. No Hoodless. He keeps an eye on each robed figure, looking for the a gangly, tall figure, a soft cheek, sparking fingers. Once you find your mark, you can’t lose track. It’s the first rule of—everything. Don’t let ‘em out of your sight.

He thinks he spots him, once, near the coast. A figure perched on a boulder in the dim light of the flames, a little leather book in his hand. His hands are slender. They carefully turn the page. There’s something about the little movements of the fingertips which remind Imekari of trailing sparks.

But the he gets called away to help unload supplies off a new dreadnought, and when he comes back, there’s no one there.

Imekari wonders, once, why nobody takes him aside to say _don’t look at the ‘Vints._ His curiosity is obvious, and nobody can read him better than his people. But the answer presents itself soon enough.

One of Imekari’s betters figures out something about the fire—how it can balance on top of water, instead of being extinguished. He presents Imekari with a stone bowl with a glimmering flame inside. Their leaders stay on a dreadnought off-shore, just off of the port as a counter-measure for safety. Imekari rows a little boat out of the bay. Seheron’s green jungles look like a sweating emerald in the sun. You can barely see the wall of flame, and how it divides the island. It’s faint.

He rows on. The fire and the stone bowl sit in a flat basket a few inches from his feet. He’s almost at the dreadnaught when there’s a sound—a rush, like a breath inhaling, that makes him look over his shoulder.

Imekari glances just in time to see the wall of fire rear back like a stallion, like a wave beaten by a hurricane, and wash over the other half of the island. It’s so quick there’s no sound at all. Just silence as linen tents evaporate under the flame, and trees, and camp fires, and the little figures he can see onshore.

All the way to the water on the other side. It does not die. Instead, it flows over the water, just like the fire in his little bowl, and burns, and burns. An unstoppable tide.

And then Imekari, and the dark dreadnought looming over his shoulder, are the only Qunari left in Seheron. They are alone now.

They are alone, except for the fire, which keeps reaching, a hand of flame extending across the sea to no one and nowhere.

* * *

 

Dorian does not go rifling through Lavellan’s things for the whiskey. At least, not yet. Instead, he reexamines his attempt at a poultice. The embrium leaves go stringy when ground up, their fibers tough as hemp. Their fire-touched redness has faded—it’s more of a green-and-gray powder. Too dry for the skin, or for anything useful. He frowns.

“Hey,” Bull says, and he sounds far away. “You done playing yet?”

“No,” answers Dorian automatically, and then glowers. “It’s not ready. I need—oil, or something.”

He asks, “Is it real dry?” Dorian nods. “I doubt elfroot’ll hurt anything.” he offers. “Lavellan always carries some. She chews it for her teeth.”

There’s some in one of her little pockets. He cuts open a fat leaf of old elfroot, with a blade the size of his thumb. Thick goo oozes out, and he tests the texture between his fingers. Sticky. Oddly warm. Bull cocks his head to get a better look.

“I told Lavellan I don’t know anything about herbs,” mutters Dorian between gritted teeth. “If I were in charge, I’d just make you march all the way back to the ramparts and hope the Orlesians keep a field surgeon on payroll.”

Bull huffs. “Dramatic. Not worth the walk.”

“You need those hands to swing that axe, last I checked.” Dorian goes back to mashing it all together with the bottom of his cup. The burn poultices Felix always gave him were brown and thick, everything in them ground into an unrecognizable paste. In his less graceful days, Dorian had a bad habit of singeing his fingers, and Felix grew tired of always having to run and fetch the healer himself.

The shadow of memory just briefly presses on his heart. A twinge. Should have asked him the recipe. Of course, there are a thousand things to ask Felix, now that he’s gone.

But he’s met with a snort from Bull. “This is a scratch, big guy. Toast for breakfast. Surgeons know how to chop, and that’s about it.”

He gives him a once-over—careful, casual, the way a healer might look at his next patient, if Dorian even faintly resembled someone with a mastery of the art. He can’t tell what’s made the nicks and scratches on Bull’s skin. A question for Blackwall, maybe, one night when they’re the last two left in the Herald’s Rest. Something a soldier would know.

The ones cut across his chest are just that—even and thin, scored like a cook’s knife in red-marbled beef. Thick ridges from blades with teeth (or Maker forbid it, actual teeth) stand up on his shoulder. Dorian doesn’t have to look to remember Bull’s back, marked up enough to be unreadable. Claw marks. Most fascinating are the pocks, thick spots of scar tissue he can’t fathom. Perhaps where the spikes from a morningstar buried themselves in flesh, dug deep, and would not let go.

Or Dorian assumes. He certainly hasn’t made a study of it.

Bull clears his throat. Dorian blinks once, and says, “Well, it’s not as though I can handle a blade. You’ve nothing to fear from me.”

Silence, before a sly grin creeps up on Bull’s face. There’s a breath of hesitation: Bull thinks about everything his face does before it happens, as far as Dorian can see. It’s not a tell, only—a beat. His mother did the same thing around polite company. Thoughtful. Measured. Like an archer aiming his arrow.

But now the grin stretches wide across his face. “Nah,” Bull blusters, with a mock seriousness, “me neither.”

“Don’t do this,” Dorian says, raising an eyebrow.

“Wrapped my hand around a hilt once or twice,” he goes on, carefully placing his gaze somewhere in the slowly dimming sky. “But hey, who hasn’t?”

Dorian slicks his finger with a glop of herbaceous sludge and promises, “I’ll shove this down your throat myself—” before Bull erupts into rumbles of laughter all the way from the belly. Dorian can’t get a word in edgewise, not even when he gathers his poultice and sits next to his outstretched legs, donned in those disgusting pinstriped pants.

There’s a tear running from Bull’s good eye, a dribble that winds its way down his rugged cheek. Bull lifts his hand, tries to brush it away with his wrist but it doesn’t work. Dorian helps automatically—a bit of rough linen bandage in his hand, a touch to the cheek, and he presses it away.

The little motion sends them both for a loop—Bull takes a little breath in the middle of a laugh, Dorian suddenly busies himself with lengths of bandage he’s torn from one of Lavellan’s shirts. Bull catches his breath on the remaining little wheezes of laughter, and Dorian thumbs a thin layer of paste onto Bull’s palm.

If it stings, Bull doesn’t say so. This part is—less foreign to Dorian than he imagined. The flesh on Bull’s hands is good as gone, red and blistered black. It will die, if it hasn’t already, and peel away like rotten onion-skin. The importance with dead flesh, if one ever has to touch it, is to treat it gently. Dorian takes care never to touch Bull’s hand at all. The poultice, gritty and wet as it is, goes smoothly, carefully smeared by his thumb.

Regardless, it is an introduction to topography. Bull’s hands are—massive. Dorian paints a mountain range with his fingers.

“Walked right into that one,” he says. “Of course, ‘Vints always do.”

Dorian smears the poultice up the inside of his arm. On his right side, the burn travels all the way into the valley of his elbow before continuing its slow rise up the forearm. A clear mark from where he cradled the great, burning trunk. “You’re the one who ran into a burning house,” he retorts. “My idiocy isn’t in question.”

That’s all that happened, at the end of the day. A burning house. Bull, running. The doorway, blocked by some part of the structure, and Bull flinging it out of the way to get inside.

Bull shrugs. “There was a sound,” he says. “Like a shriek. Figured it was a kid. Somebody in trouble.”

If Bull had said anything else—anything, in the whole damned world, Dorian would have let it lie. Anything else. Perhaps even, _lifting the heaviest shit I can while it’s on fire is a challenge I don’t get too often._

But Dorian will never forget the way Bull ran, as though there were nowhere else in the world he could go. Legs pumping, his axe left standing in the sun as when he made it to the smoldering threshold. His warrior’s yawp.

When he’d lifted the trunk, a cat, small and brown and terrified within an inch of its life, had darted out between his feet, escaping the fire. There was no child. There was no danger. There wasn’t—anything, then, but Bull and his cooked hands and a house on fire.

It happens before Dorian can stop himself. It tumbles out, the way truth always does. “That’s a lie,” he says.

To his credit, Bull doesn’t even react. Doesn’t sit up straight. Doesn’t blink.

“Cute,” he says. “What else you got?”

The hairs on the back of Dorian’s neck stand up in pure irritation. “I was there,” he says irritably. “I saw fire.”

“Yeah.” Bull puts on the most patient air possible. He glances down at his burns. “Think we’re all in agreement there.”

Dorian begins winding the bandage at the top of his arm, gritting his teeth. “I didn’t hear anything.”

Bull’s eyebrows rise to the top of his forehead. “This a new perk of travelling with you? Gotta check with the ‘Vint before I run off, might make him feel better.”

The blow is—low, or it’s just precisely where it needs to be, but Dorian fails to crush any of his frustration. He’s good at this part, and he knows it—Dorian always knows when someone is trying to shake him off like a fly. It fuels him, and he digs his heels in as he carefully wraps the bandage around Bull’s elbow. He’ll need more in a moment.

“If you want to resort to petty nationalism, we can spit at each other all night,” Dorian informs him, grabbing another pile of linen strips. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Bull sighs, his head tipping back against the trunk. “Okay. You didn’t hear it. I heard—it was a scream, from the house. Sounded like they were in pain. So I went.” He shrugs. “That’s what I got, Dorian.”

A pause. “Maybe Lavellan and I didn’t hear it,” Dorian says, “but there’s no way to explain how Sera didn’t.”

If he didn’t have his fingers wrapped around muscle, he would have missed the twitch of tension running through him. The way a whole body reacts when it remembers it’s forgotten something.

Dorian takes the opening when offered. “She’s made her whole life out of hearing things she wasn’t supposed to and then sticking her nose straight in. She doesn’t hesitate.” He has a rather gnawing fondness for that part of her, actually. Sera goes and goes. He gets a new bandage for Bull’s forearm. “But she only moved because Lavellan did. You can’t tell me she wouldn’t hear a scream so loud it made you barge into a burning house.”

He pins the last statement like a magister making his final argument in front of the Archon. He should leave it there, but Dorian _does_ like winning, especially when he’s been made to sit here and entertain a man for being an idiot. He goes on. “Lavellan indulges you because you listen to her. I suppose the cat owes one of its lives to you, but I was there, Bull.”

Silence. More poultice for the wrists—Dorian thinks of how one would lift a tree trunk, and how much smoldering weight would be brought to bear on them. Two more smears of sludge. Bull’s wrists are thick, like the rest of him.

No retort ever comes, and Dorian glances back up to look at him, to see what sly and cutting remark he’s geared up for this.

Bull’s face, always covered in its careful veneer, like a polished layer of marble on top of limestone, looks—weary. Each line is more pronounced, as though in a span of ten minutes Dorian has committed a very thorough excavation. Even the soft lines as the corner of his eyes and his mouth, the patches of skin that are soft and tender on every person, under every thumb, go tough like old leather.

He looks storm-beaten. He looks his age.

It is then Dorian realizes that a little part of Bull was lying (he’s a spy, after all, when _isn’t_ he?), but most of him wasn’t.

Bull clears his throat, a sound of leaves being scratched away. He rolls his shoulders against the tree trunk, loosens his muscles.

Dorian doesn’t say anything, but he wraps Bull’s wrists. For the first time in recent memory, perhaps he’s said enough. Some kind of prairie cricket out in the long grasses begins its high chirp. Swallows, in their unflappable pairs, hunt for bugs as the sun nearly disappears. The smoky haze of the plains makes a delicate screen against the sky, the just-visible stars flickering to light.

“Does your body ever move,” Bull asks, not looking at him, staring far off into the dusk-blue horizon and the coming night, “because there’s no other choice?”

* * *

 

_Drakonis, 9:41 Dragon._

The stone against his back is cold, and Dorian has lost time.

It’s—a decidedly new experience. Being imprisoned is not, being alone is not, being in the dark is not, but all these things together, and for so long has rendered his ability to understand reality useless.

There’s a lot of sap among his countrymen who practice necromancy: there are those who do it for power, for pleasure, and some who do it because they can feel the cycle of life under their skin as warmly as the thrum of blood and heartbeat. Dorian likes the third category the least—they tend to lose their minds early, prone to nattering and great wide eyes about the way things are, or should be, or will be. As though working with the dead gives them a window to the future. A better understanding of life itself. _Cycles_ , they’ll say. _Everything in due time. Rotation, back to the center._

A stupid reason to study the dead, all things considered.

Of course, he can admit now a connection with his surroundings, however imagined or ethereal, would be a boon against hopelessness. He doesn’t know how long he’s been in this Fereldan dungeon, or if Alexius is just hoping to starve him to death. Has it been a week? A year? A handful of days?

He sleeps for long stretches, and much too deeply. He tells himself his body is collecting energy—they don’t feed him much, and all the sitting is hard on his joints. Saving his strength for the right moment, when he’ll see a path to freedom. The guards snatch him, take him to rooms, have him drink red vials of Maker-knows-what. (Dorian knows exactly what it is.) But nothing seems to take, and here he rots, next to a tin bucket half-full of his own waste.

He wakes up in blackness, silence. Not even demons come in his dreams anymore. There’s nothing for them to feast on here. Dorian puts his back against the wall, rubs at his eyes. There’s nothing to tell him what time it is, if the sun even still exists under the great breach in the sky. He thinks, _this, again_ with a derision so sour it could cure a lemon.

And then, a sound. A miracle.

An— _enormous_ belch.

It echoes a little against the stones of the hall. For the first time in his life, Dorian forgets how his voice works. When he remembers, the creak that emerges from between his lips only sounds a little like him. But the derision is just the same. “— _Excuse me?_ ”

A pause, and then a throat clearing.

“Thought I was by myself.” The voice emerging from the other side of the wall is probably a figment of Dorian’s imagination—it’s hoarse and deep, as though it was born here in these dungeons far beneath the surface. Dorian felt an earthquake once, when he was a child. A real one, not an upstart in the heart of the city losing control of some experiment or other.

The ground rippled, as though the rocks had lost their sense of self and given into the waves on the shore. The cobblestones broke out from their formations in the street, popped out like loose teeth. Dorian had shrieked and grabbed his father’s robes.

His father had only stood utterly still. Not a single flinch. He merely crossed his arms and waited for it to pass. It was over in a moment, and then he gently pried Dorian’s fingers from his clothes.

Wherever the voice came, from whatever body it lived in—it coasted out on a tide, a wave of sound that rumbled along the ground under his legs.

“When—” Dorian begins, and then furrows his brow.

He can hear the sound of a shrug—of cloth, or skin, catching on the rough stones as the shoulders move. “About four hours ago. Figured I was alone. Nobody made any noise.”

The answer is so ludicrous Dorian can barely make himself say it. But he does. “I must have been asleep.” His throat is still creaky from lack of use. But he manages to shape the words with a pristine casualness, as though he were a very elegant cat, napping in some sunlight, too content to be disturbed. One must hold onto certain vestiges, even in the pit of the void.

“Huh.” The answer comes after a pause. It’s confirmed something for the person on the side of the wall, and Dorian doesn’t have to be a soothsayer to learn it’s nothing good. “You’ve been down here a long time, then.”

“Probably,” he says, and that’s it’s own answer too. “That wasn’t my question, though.”

“Oh.” The voice is surprised. “Didn’t mean to jump in.”

Dorian tugs one of his earlobes. “ _When_ is it, precisely?”

A moment of thought from the other side. “Last time I knew,” he says, “it was the eleventh of Drakonis.”

His stomach clenches, tight as a fist. Robs him of his ability to say thank you, or to pretend the revelation doesn’t come as a swift blow to the ribs.

A long time. His name day has come and gone. Dorian is another year older in this hateful place.

“You okay?” The voice sounds concerned. “It’s been awhile, sounds like.”

Dorian chokes down his own bile, smooths out his voice and says, “The last time I knew was sometime in Kingsway. After I was brought in. But not terribly long since.”

“Hmm. My—unit—” There’s hesitation, as though voice chooses a very careful word. “We got pulled into the last strike against the walls here. This old shit’s got creatures I’ve never seen before. That was a week ago. Could have lost some time, but I’m pretty sure it’s Drakonis.”

“He made them out of lyrium,” Dorian supplies, and the voice grunts an acknowledgement. Anything to deflect from the date.

“Never seen anything move that fast. Went straight through us.”

Dorian nods. “Brutal. You forget paper doesn’t stand a chance against a knife.”

A _harrumph_ of agreement. “Didn’t realize I was paper,” he says, and then that’s all he says. Dorian can hear the queer ache in his low tones, the way saying something aloud makes it real.

Quiet, then. Hope is, at best, a waste of time.

Dorian takes a breath and says, quietly, “When you say _last_ , do you mean…”

He can’t bring himself to finish the sentence: do you mean last as in the most recent attempt, or perhaps something else.

The cluck of a tongue. “You want to know?”

Something about the hesitation puts Dorian on edge. “I’ve been stuck down here for months,” he snaps. “You don’t need to hold me by the wrist and reassure me all will be well.”

“Shit.” He can hear the body on the other side of the wall adjusting, stretching out legs. “Sorry.”

Dorian opens his mouth, and closes it. The abrupt sincerity of the response is unexpected. “No harm done,” he says.

“I don’t—” The voice starts and stops. “Honestly, I don’t know how many people are left out there.”

Dorian nods slowly. Confirmation. Everyone for themselves, now. He lost track of how many times some country or other ground itself bloody against the stronghold here, including his own.

“I heard rumors,” Dorian says, with a shrug. “But I waited until the—tear—ate the sky.” Silence. He clucks his tongue. “Foolish.” He doesn’t mention how he knows the mage pulling all the strings, or his son, or how the words _Felix is dead_ can’t be made language on his tongue. Not the stranger’s problem, anyway, even if was his business. They’re all well-fucked down here.

“Yeah, well.” The voice doesn’t offer pity, or sympathy, just a simple acceptance. “Is what it is, I guess.”

Dorian exhales, his head tipping back against the stone as he thinks. “So much for my southern vacation.”

The huff of breath. “You’re from the north?”

“Yes.” He doesn’t say where from, and doesn’t ask. Neither does the voice. He has the nagging suspicion it might ruin everything, and there is so much ruined already. “Our dungeons always had better ventilation,” he says airily.

“Or else you’d roast alive.” The voice sighs. “Heat. That was a thing, once.”

Dorian chuckles. “Good beer.”

“Yeah,” says the voice. “Fucking— _seasoning_ on my food.”

“I think the Fereldans have decided to use salt as currency. Not much gold left at the end of the world.” Dorian deadpans. “And so nothing left for the stewpot, I’m afraid.”

The voice laughs at that, soft and scratchy. More charitable than amused. A joke at the expense of southerners is more like a warm brick tucked in at the feet. A comfort.

Dorian feels himself settling into the idea of this, too quickly and too much, but he can’t help it. A voice, somewhere in the darkness. Not to make the loneliness disappear, but to cut it into bits. He exhales a long breath, and then he hears a throat clear.

“They’ll probably be coming back around.” He sounds so solemn, all of a sudden. “I’m big. I put up a fight, they’ll give up pretty quick. Might drag you out instead.”

Dorian shrugs. “Nothing new,” he says, but the voice grunts, interrupting.

“One the guards has a bad leg.” Oddly instructive. “The one with the black stains on his hood. Broken knee, I think, never healed right. Get him there with a foot or your fist and you have a chance.”

“A chance at _what?_ ” Dorian doesn’t bother hiding the derision in his voice. Nothing is as foolish as hope. The strange knows it as well as he does. No one is making it out of Corypheus’ dungeon alive. “Don’t be insipid.”

“Do it.” The voice, steady as stone.

“ _You_ do it,” Dorian retorts.

“They got my guys.” The voice goes dark, suddenly, with promised vengeance. A blade on a whetstone. “Can’t leave without ‘em. But I gotta figure out where they are first.”

“Then use the chance.” Dorian folds his arms tightly across his chest.

“I’ve got a good read on these assholes. There’ll be others. You’ve been down here a long while.” The voice is quieter now. “I’ve got nothing but time. You get a turn. You get out.”

“I won’t make it ten feet out of the hall.”

That shrug again. “At least you die there, not in here.” A pause. “Not in your sleep.”

It stings, sharp enough that Dorian’s vision blurs a little. The comment is like a scalpel’s blade. “ _Kaffas_ ,” he mutters.

“Don’t think you will, though.” The voice sounds clear, sure of itself. Settled. “Go south when you hit the hallway. There’s a big door carved with a rune—take a left. There’s a storage room at the end of the hall. Should be an exit through a windmill out there. Make it that far, and you can see just how nice the sky looks these days.”

Dorian snaps, “This place is crawling with mages.”

A thoughtful noise. “Once, probably. But there’s a lot of soldiers out there, and not as many prisoners as there used to be. Odds aren’t great, but you should take _okay_ for what it’s worth.”

Still no answer to the question. “Why are you telling me this?” Dorian demands, sharp enough to cut.

Silence falls. Dorian thinks, _that’s it_ , and his chance is over. Hope chokes itself in his throat, like a mouthful of rotten grain he can’t swallow.

“I don’t know.” The voice sounds—curious. Bewildered, maybe. “Nothing in the whole world is gonna shake out the way it should.” A tongue, run over teeth. “But maybe you will.”

Dorian doesn’t know what to do with that. “You—”

“I’m gonna find my boys.” The voice is firm. “Do whatever you want. Just seems like it’s how things should be.”

There’s no time. The scrape of stone, the familiar squeal of the iron door from down the hall. “Remember what I said?”

“Black stains, bad knee,” whispers Dorian. If his face is wet, nobody knows but the stones of his cell. “South at the hallway. Left at the rune. Storage room, and—out.”

“Yeah.” He sounds satisfied. A key, perfectly latching a lock. Golden and content. “You got it.”

In a world of darkness, Dorian only knows his surroundings by sound. The metal patter of feet in the hallway, barely lit by dim mage-lights. The cell beside him, creaking open. A howl, a rumble from under the earth, that rises and rises, winding towards the light.

* * *

 

Dusk brings a cool breeze across the plain. Dorian listens to it waft through the long grass, smells the foul stench of ash and waste from the spoiled river, and shakes his head.

“I don’t,” he admits. Honesty for honesty. “Not something I’d put down for you, either.”

The question refocuses Bull, and suddenly his eyes are on him. “Why?”

“You think through everything,” Dorian says. “I imagine it’s one of your spying habits. Every wiggle of your face must be weighed and measured.”

Bull shrugs, a particularly intolerable gesture. It means nothing. He has finishes both of Bull’s arms and wrists, and tears some of his bandages into thinner strips for his fingers.

“I said _I don’t know_ , Bull,” he finally says, beginning with his palm. “I didn’t say _I don’t care_.”

Bull says, “Not really your business.”

Dorian swears under his breath. “Does this work with other people?” he demands. “It must, or you wouldn’t think to try it with me. I suppose a dropped hint—” _Dropped hint_ was so mild, when what Bull said had made Dorian’s heart stop, “—satisfies most idiots.”

The look Bull gives him is dry enough to instill a new famine over the plains.

“Satisfaction is not my forte,” Dorian informs him. “I consider myself incapable of it.”

When Bull says nothing, as though pretending nothing was said will solve the problem facing them under the tree, Dorian loses his patience. “I may not be intimately familiar with the imagination of battle, Bull, but if this war doesn’t resolve itself in a timely manner I’m sure I will be.”

“But you’re not now.” At least it’s a response. “And chances are good you won’t. That’s the point.”

The way Bull says it would make any player of the Game tilt their fan—somehow he’s said _your head is usually stuck pretty far up your own ass_ so roundabout he’s almost missed it.

All his moaning about Lavellan demanding he make the poultice. Their idle bickering all the way from Skyhold. _Kaffas._ “Ah. It must not matter to me then, yes? Because I’m a ‘Vint, and a mage, and I have so many better things to do.”

Bull shrugs. “I don’t see how what happens to me has much bearing on you, except when Lavellan makes a show of it to keep you in line.” He rolls one of his shoulders again. “I appreciate the gesture, I guess, but let’s not play like you reinvented the wheel, here.”

“I’d do it even if she didn’t ask me.” He nearly spits out the words. “I don’t know how to do it _well_ , but I wouldn’t just sit here and let you roast.”

Bull doesn’t look convinced. Dorian finishes the last winding bandage around Bull’s hand, releases him. “I mind if you hurt others,” Dorian says, very quietly. He turns back to the bowl of poultice, scoops it sloppily into one of Sera’s old, empty flasks. “I mind if you hurt yourself.”

Silence, then. Admittedly, it wasn’t until he said it aloud that he knew it to be true. He busies himself with putting away bandages, dusting bits of leaves from his robes. He doesn’t expect anything else, and perhaps he never should have to begin with.

Dorian has ruined many things in his life, some rather gleefully, but—while the Iron Bull frustrates him, needles at his sensibilities, he did not anticipate this as the moment they would divide over. When they stand up from under the tree, whatever tremulous allyship they have as members of the Inquisition, as people who don’t want to see the world burned to a crisp, will disappear. With every second of silence that ticks on, the fact becomes simpler, clearer. Bull’s correct, of course—he doesn’t have any right to push, but Dorian doesn’t know how to do anything else. It was not meant to work, perhaps, only to turn them in opposite directions, to keep walking.

So when Bull clears his throat, Dorian nearly drops the flask he’s holding.

Bull makes a noise under his breath. “You hang out around a battlefield long enough, and your mind starts filling in the blanks.” The words are short, precisely chosen. “Happens sometimes, to everybody. Blackwall and Cullen would say the same thing.”

“Apparently.” Dorian recovers the glass in his hand and places it safely away. “Even sound, Bull?” It seems intolerable, to be jerked about by illusion in the name of duty.

He nods, just a simple jerk of his head. “Yeah. Hasn’t happened in awhile.”

“As far as you know.” It comes out cheekier than he wants. Too sharp.

But Bull only shrugs. “Fair point,” he says.

Dorian opens Lavellan’s pack, and digs for a steel flask. She never carries liquor in glass—too likely it’d break out on the open road. He doesn’t bother with cups. They’ll need to secret it away whenever she comes back over the hill.

He resumes his spot on Bull’s right side, his legs folded under him.

“It was real as anything.” Bull gives voice to Dorian’s next question. "And then my feet were going. I just—went." He offers no more than that.

Dorian gives him the flask first—Bull squeezes it between his wrists, raises it to his lips. A good swig. When it slips a bit, Dorian reaches and balances the end with his fingers before retrieving it. A long silence as the whiskey burns its way down. Lavellan doesn’t carry anything expensive on the road, either.

Dorian says, “You were trying to be in the right place at the right time.”

Bull’s jaw goes tight. “Don’t try and feed me a silver lining.” His voice doesn’t go sharp, but it’s not gentle, either. “Not in your wheelhouse.”

“I know,” Dorian retorts. He takes a sip of whiskey, lets it settle on his tongue before swallowing. “My best friend got infected by the Blight two years ago. Darkspawn attacked his family on the road.” He takes one more sip before passing it back, eyes Bull’s hands as he tips it up to his mouth. “His father was my teacher. It—changed him.”

A sigh, now, from Bull. “It’s not the same thing.”

“He dreamed of it so often he stopped sleeping,” Dorian says. “He couldn’t walk the streets alone at night because he’d cast spells at shadows. Lightning so quick it was like he pulled it from his pocket.” He snaps his finger. Alexius almost killed someone, once, but Dorian doesn’t mention it.

He doesn’t nod in agreement, but there’s no shrug either. Just another sip of the whiskey. When he brings it back down to his lap, Dorian collects it.

“You want to be at the right place at the right time,” Bull says finally. “It’s not possible.”

“No,” Dorian agrees. “Never.” But a house on fire, a situation near identical to any common sight of war and ruin—

“I didn’t have to run too far.” The certainty in Bull’s tone steadies them both. Dorian can’t remember if he’s ever heard Bull think out loud before. “I could lift what was blocking the door.” He rubs his wrist against the back of his hand, as though it itches.

There’s nothing to say. Nothing to smooth it over, nothing to make it better. Time obeys nothing, least of all men. _What a fucking shame_ , Dorian thinks, with sudden vehemence. Unjust in the extreme, against whatever fate has planned for Bull. The acuity of anger bewilders him—he can taste the bitterness in his mouth, as though it were all his own.

But Bull settles back against the tree. He’s extricated whatever needed pulling out of him, at least for now. And Dorian is still here. Perhaps that’s what matters.

Dorian lifts the whiskey to his lips, and then raises it a little. A haphazard toast. “You could,” he says. “You did.”

Bull grunts, a little sound of agreement. He drinks once more. Dorian eyes the flask, and when it slips and falls from between Bull’s wrists, he catches it with an open palm, and hands it back.

The moon rises, high and fat in the wine-dark sky. For this moment, a handful of minutes between now and Lavellan coming up the hill, hauling a ram over her shoulder, and Sera, grinning like the sun itself at her prize, they sit. Dorian’s knee presses idly into Bull’s thigh, Bull’s bandaged hands lie in his lap. Pyre fires glimmer in the distance from the forts, but don’t draw near. No sound carries towards them on the wind. There is only the two of them, under the tree, and the quiet.

 


End file.
